The Art of Peter �str�m: Order amid Exuberance
Carter Ratcliff
In Peter Åström’s
recent paintings, line doesn’t simply move over the surface. It ploughs
through the surface—a surface which is a mixture of pigment and modeling
paste. As the line advances, it evolves. In fact, Åström’s line
has been evolving since the early 1980s. Along the way it has met—and entangled
itself with—an astonishing variety of other forms.
First and last, Åström’s line is the trace of a gesture, the
mark left as he takes the measure of a canvas or a sheet of paper. It is decisive.
You get the feeling that the artist is on familiar ground, that he is at home
on the surface where his line is unfurling—this two-dimensional domain with
its border of straight edges and right angles. He has taken the measure of this
place before.
An artist’s
decisiveness might be confining, a source of rigidity. For Åström,
it is liberating. His confidence unleashes his line, permitting it to be inventive,
even playful.
At its most sparse,
this line is like a path worn into the earth, not slowly, but all at once. Doubling
back on itself, it sometimes creates a form with the look of an island floating
in the sea.
Earth has become
water, and Åström has combined the roles of graffitist and cartographer.
Of course, the island discovered with your first glance may, with a second glance,
turn into a boulder or a leaf. Sparseness invites metamorphosis, though Åström
occasionally slows down the flow of shifting interpretations with a few judiciously
placed marks. Acquiring eyes, nose, and mouth, an oval becomes, undeniably, a
face. Or the looping exuberance of a certain line makes it impossible to deny
that a flower has been evoked.
Intricately snarled,
Åström’s line sometime supplies a face with a body and a body
with a posture, confronting us with a particular person. In images like these,
the aura of portraiture is strong. Yet even here it is not quite accurate to
speak of depiction. Rather, Åström’s full-length figures are
hieroglyphs-pictographs, if you like—with an unusually high degree of specificity.
And his line is always ready, it is eager, t shed the overly specific and once
more become allusive, evocative, utterly abstract.
Some of his more
mysterious marks suggest that he muses now and then about the possibility of
inventing an alphabet. For it sometimes seems that new letters are forming in
his paintings’ luminous expanses of yellow and gray and ocher. After all,
Åström’s always distinctive line counts as a kind of handwriting,
and no painter’s sensibility is without linguistic tendencies.
Åström’s
are strong and he gives them free rein, yet they always give way before his incorrigibly
pictorial impulses. Even his most abstract imagery originates in the experience
of seeing.
His line is an
attempt to grasp the visible—literally, as if what is seen could somehow
be plucked from the world and transferred to the canvas. And if we note that
“grasp” is a metaphor for understanding, another metaphor emerges,
as Åström’s line becomes legible as a form of though charged
with feeling. It’s as if he paints not to record the world but to reflect
upon it, to imbue it with the spirit and tone of his presence.
Often—and
this is characteristic of a painter like Åström, a present-day heir
of modernism—his reflection on the world is a reflection on his means of
grasping it. Thus his line is capable of sudden, self-transforming leaps. Instead
of gouging its way through the surface, it thins out and widens and moves over
the surface like a translucent shadow. Or it spreads into a rough blotch which
merges with the surface itself.
Limber, wiry, wooden,
metallic, elastic, sometimes even cloudy, Åström’s line is amazingly
various. It’s tempting to suggest that even the spots of primary color which
he places at crucial intersections of the image are mutations of the line that
wanders with such purposeful vagrancy across the surfaces of his paintings and
drawings—as if the line had come to a sudden halt and burst into a blossom
of red, yellow, or blue.
As Åström’s
line circles back on itself, so do its variations. Tracing this itinerary of
change, it’s a shock to note that, along the way, he has painted realistic
pictures of things—seashells, for instance. On occasion, he abandoned his
brush for the camera. Among his earliest works are photographic images of people
and things. Here we see Åström reflecting on the possibilities of
detachment—of engaging the world at a distance, not with the hand’s
immediacy.
Toward the end
of the 1980s, he made photographs of churches in Mexico. Transferring portions
of these images to paper, he then marked them with simple, painted shapes. This
blend of the detached and the immediate was inevitable, given Åström’s
restless need to integrate observable fact with the subtleties of his sensibility.
He wants to give a personal vivacity even to images of impersonal accuracy, and
in every season of his art there is a risk of being overwhelmed by the sheer
variety of his gesture. We survive this risk—we sense order amid exuberance—because
the elements of his images are so securely rooted to the surfaces where we see
them. Like the forms that compose a powerful landscape, these elements have an
air of belonging where they are. This effect gives stability—indeed, intelligibility—to
all his paintings, even the most exuberantly crowded ones.
This is an intelligibility
peculiar to Åström’s art. To understand it, we need to look again
at his earliest works—the photographic pieces from the late 1970s. Here
the very shape of the canvas responds to the shape of the image. You see the
structure of a face or a beach chair negotiating with the structure of the surface.
And the same negotiations are resumed, under different circumstances, in those
canvases of 1989-90 which are shaped in response to the painted images they bear.
From this reciprocity comes clarity: the image is as is because it is where it
is. With their eccentric outlines, these works effect a kind of reversal. The
placement of form becomes the formulation of a place, an irreducibly specific
locale.
We begin to see
Åström’s art in full when we notice that all his works—including
the majority, the ones with standard, rectangular surfaces—show us images
of particular places. Always, his line launches a negotiation with the canvas
or the paper, and continues t until the entire surface has been accounted for.
Vacancy has been filled. Bringing corners and edges into play,Åström’s
line brings the entire surface to life.
Hovering partway
between the visible world we all share and the inward regions of the artist’s
imagination, each of his works is a site specific to the energies it inspired.
See that and you may see, amid the traceries of Åström’s line,
hints of earth and stone and well-worn architecture. And you’ll see the
image opening up, becoming an immensity filled with the light and air—the
unrepeatable weather—of certain moment.
These moments must
be recalled, for Åström makes no sketches of the places he evokes.
In his art, the past has the immediacy of now—and “now” has all
the intricate clarity of the past refined by memory.
